Stories of December

And there goes December, the last month of 2018. It completely flew by and as I write this blog post, I realize it felt like the shortest month ever. It started off the best way possible, with lots of pasta and a board game filled evening. There’s really nothing better than that during these gloomy December evenings. Well, maybe a museum visit which was what we did the following day. We visited the Grétry museum in Liège, the birthplace of the composer André Grétry. The small house instantly transports you a few centuries back in time and I had a lot of fun visiting it. I’ll probably make a separate blog post on it and another museum so you can read more about it.

As I mentioned in the previous stories, we upgraded our camera and I decided to test it out by visiting Brussels and Ghent. I took lots of exterior and interior shots and while I still feel like I’m learning how to use it, it’s slowly growing on me. I was purposefully taking interior shots, such as of my favorite cafés. One of those evolved into a blog post that I published right before Christmas. It was about a tea room very dear to me called Huset and you can read more about it here.

My umpteenth visit to Brussels was one of my favorite ones ever. I spent an hour going through vinyls at Hors-série and came out with two movie soundtracks (Radio Days and Shall We Dance & Swing Time). After that, I finally visited Maison Autrique. In short, it’s Horta’s first Art Nouveau townhouse that is now a museum and I absolutely fell in love with it. You can expect a separate blog post on this beauty soon! And to top it all off, a visit to Comptoir Florian led to purchasing some tea for home since one of my Christmas gifts from Grégory was a beautiful teapot!

Maison Autrique

Generally speaking, I skipped out on the Christmas craze, like I usually do and stayed away from shops. Puppy walks followed by cuddles while watching old black and white movies. That’s how our December looked like. Midway through the month we finally got some snow so naturally, we spent the entire morning in the forest with Miles. Last year, the snow basically stayed all December long but this year was different. Much warmer and with only one snowfall. But at least it was something and I know how happy Miles gets around snow!

We spent a week in Croatia for the Christmas holidays, where Grégory finally met my parents while I took care of translating everything back and forth. As it usually is in big families the Christmas holidays were pretty loud and chaotic. Exactly as I always remember them! Nonetheless, it was nice to see certain family members and friends after four long years. As Grégory put it, this trip was his little gift to me and I couldn’t be more grateful it happened. I still miss the puppies like crazy!

Not to dwell too much on it but certain cultural and societal Croatian peculiarities left Grégory with a cultural shock. Even for me, the only reason for going back is family and friends. There are so many things about Croatian people’s mindsets and their prejudices towards everyone that bother me. Being back in friendly, open and tolerant Belgium felt genuinely relaxing. Despite the gloomy rainy days welcoming us back. Like every year, we spent a calm New Year’s Eve at home with Miles. And now onto 2019 and all the books waiting to be read!